Skills to become a Software Tester

People who are coming to Software Testing field and planning to build up the career as Software Testing Professional, I think this post would be very helpful for them. According to my perception, a Testing Professional should have following qualities (or should practice following qualities)

Skills to become a Software Tester

Innovation

Representation

Documentation

Communication

Negotiation

Estimation

Day by day these qualities become sharper through more practices, experiences and learning from various situations. Let me go through the importance each of these terms one by one:

Innovation: Testing is a job which is more like break and entering job! You have to break the rules. To break the rules you have to think several paths.For example regarding a bug, you have thought of Path A, Path B, and Path C. But there is another path left Path D and which is more important one! So as a testing professional, you have to be innovative so that you don’t miss any important scenario!

Representation: You have to have the capability to represent your findings properly.For example during testing an online shopping system you found that after successful checkout inventory is not reducing. So you have reported as “Checkout is not working”. Trust me this is misleading information. People don’t have time to find out the real meaning of your reported Bug.

Documentation: This related to above term in many ways. Good documentation skill will help you in proper sentence organization, to choose the right term in right place. So it’s very important to practice this quality. This skill will enhance day by day as much as you practice. There is a term called Bug Advocacy, this is what a testing guy must practice. And trust me the impressive skill of documentation is the must for better bug advocacy.

Communication: This is very important for a testing guy. You must have the power to sell your reported bugs. You have to have the confident attitude during communicating with others and must have the crystal clear idea about what you are pointing. Whenever a person cannot understand your reported scenario, you have explained the scenario in such a manner so that s/he can understand within very short time.

Negotiation: Sometimes you have to negotiate about your reported scenario. Probably this is not a vital issue at this moment but may impact in long run. Don’t argue with developers, rather come to a decision. The approach may be let them decide and provide your opinion. That’s how a team works actually! So you have been able to negotiate depending on the context, nature of bugs, impact and so on.

Estimation: Sometimes this skill becomes so important. The skill of proper estimation will help to go further in the career. Whenever any task will be assigned to then your superior definitely will ask you about your plan to execute the task, estimated time required. Now if the difference between your estimation and actual found huge then definitely you’ll be asked for the explanation. Now if this continues to happen again and again then management will lose confidence on you. So it is very important to work on this skill each and every chance you get to estimate.